Electoral politics and lived realities

I21

I believe in a diversity of tactics. I believe that electoral politics is necessary. I hate it….So even when I thought it was the right thing to do I hated it. I do not like electoral politics but I consider electoral politics to be important particularly given the fact that as the left we're so fucking weak. So to me it's an arrogant position to dismiss electoral politics because what it does is to dismiss the day-to-day lives of working people and poor people.

Airing our differences

I28

...polemicizing can be a danger and people don't talk, or groups don't talk, to each other. I agree that to some extent it's not helpful. To some extent it is. To give people a chance to really explicate the intricacies of what they model for a better society, I mean to some extent that's good. Let's hear that.

Demonstrating success

I14

When most people think of politics, they think of electoral politics. So while many of us may think of this in much broader terms as far as measuring winning I think we have to give ourselves things that can be actually measured and [success in] electoral politics in the next two to five years probably wouldn't make sense for any kind of political movement that would develop. So I don't think that that would be on the goal post but it would certainly involve engagement with that political process in some way. So we actually have to be able to win things because that's the only way that we convince people that we can succeed.

The meaning of ‘radical’

I15

I don't...think that being radical is necessarily about having a project about how the world should be or about how we can change it but is always about understanding that from our most individual and most intimate and personal relations all the way up to the most impersonal and macro social relations there's something wrong here and that it's a change at all levels that's going to be required if we want to live in a world where we're free and we have a certain level of autonomy and equality. Do I consider myself a radical? Yeah, but I do struggle with...that language because I don't think it's accessible to people who are outside of political movements.

Hope and moving beyond

I1

I have tremendous amounts of hope. I don't know what folks who don't have that do….I think in the course of human existence the current system, capitalism…[has had an] incredibly short lifespan. Longer than my life, so there's a sense of perspective, but really in terms of the way that humans have organized, it’s one form amongst many that we've gone through and I think that we can move beyond that.

Winning, solidarity, and common sense

I3

I guess in a grander way, I'm thinking of a quote...by Zygmunt Bauman who is a post-modern theorist. I remember reading an article of his and he ended by saying something along the lines of: the day you don't have to justify yourselves for being in solidarity with everybody else is the day that that's achieved. It's an abstract thought but in a way if you don't have to defend your decision about entering [into a relationship of] solidarity with someone, if you don't have to justify that, then it means that it's understood in common sense and therefore, if you don't have to explain that or justify that to anybody, then that means that you've won...in a way.

Taking back our communities

I27

I think we need to recognize that we want to get to that point where we're really taking back...our community. It's not that I'm opposed to violent stuff, it's just that we need to do the groundwork so we can lay that out. That requires collective decisions, patience, and getting to that point is not something that just happens right away. [That’s] one [of the] thing[s] I can appreciate...about the Zapatistas, they went into the jungle in 1983 and didn't come out until 1994...and I think that's something that we need to think about.

Violence, clarity, and context

I19

Diversity of tactics - really what it boils down to is black bloc versus no black bloc and that...gets turned into violence versus non-violence [but] they don't line up. I think starting with a definition of what is violence, and what is the black bloc, and where does it fit on the spectrum of violence, and what's the particular advantages and disadvantages of a black bloc, and taking that out of the conversation of violence versus non-violence because it's not the same question as far as I'm concerned. Equating those things doesn't make any sense to me. When I think of violence...in social movements [I think of] revolutionary wars or something [like that] which has no bearing [on] what's happening in our context at the moment. So what do I think of violence? I think it's certainly justified and necessary in cases of self-defense.

Winning over the long haul

I14

What does winning look like? At some point it's a definitive break from capitalism. I don't know...how long that process is. After that break it's not [over], socialism, or anarchism, or whatever we want to call this new utopia we're creating is going to take a really, really long time to develop. Humans need to become entirely re-socialized, we need to start looking at things in very different ways. That's a really long process.

Dark futures

I8

I might not live to see it, it might be a hundred years after I die, but [the] fall of democracy, [the] fall of the monetary system, I see that accelerating. I actually can almost see it before I die. Just the way capitalism is like a cancer, they both want the same thing, constant growth, and just like cancer it's starting to chew on itself, and it's starting to get out of the control of the masters, and cracks are starting to show in its facade, and it's evil, and I just feel that blackness getting thicker, [like] fog.